Why You Must Build a List

Email marketing gives you that chance to establish credibility and trust!

The only way you’re going to reach your full potential as an affiliate (or even for that matter selling your own stuff) is to send people to a blog that collects a list.

If you’re one of the people who assume list building is hard to do, then let me tell you that it is a lot harder and a lot more work, time and money to make the same number of sales without a list, than it is to collect email addresses and then convince people to buy.

Actually, you won’t need to “convince people to buy” if you build a relationship with your subscribers and they get to know, like and trust you.

It’s not the size of your list, it’s the relationship you have with that list that counts.

But I’ll talk more about that later…

As I said earlier, a good sales page will have a conversion rate of about 2% or thereabouts.

Now consider this – You need to send 50 people to the sales page to get one sale and if you do that without capturing their email address, you need to find another 50 people before you can expect to make your next commission.

So it might look like a really good deal when you’re promoting a Clickbank product and getting a 75% commission but when you consider the time and effort to get the traffic and then get a sale from such a small percentage of that traffic, you’re working too hard.

If you capture the email address first, you can still send your visitor to the sales page (so you’re not actually losing anything by doing that) and you can also send them to other places, offers, or even pages with Adsense Ads on them, so you stand to make a lot more money.

So to be a successful affiliate marketer YOU MUST GET THE LIST FIRST

The potential to increase your income is considerable and the potential to reduce your workload is considerable.

In fact there’s no downside to building a list as an affiliate marketer – even if it is only to send people a series of pre-prepared presell newsletters that encourage them to buy.

You can have a series of emails written that do the preselling for you and then just capture email addresses and start delivering those emails to them automatically over a few days.

This is easy and once the message sets are uploaded they don’t need to be touched again and is as close to set and forget income as you could ask for…. although you will still need to be driving traffic to the capture form.

This works really well especially if you’re targeting a product or service that doesn’t have a lot of opportunity for additional backend income (which is something that I usually advise against)

This alone can increase your conversions from 2% to 6% or 8% and when you start converting that into profits you will see how it quickly adds up.

Let’s have a look…

You get 100 visitors to your blog and you send them directly to a sales letter of someone else’s in the hope of making a sale – at 2% conversion 98 people aren’t going to be of any value to you because they won’t buy.

2 sales at (say) $47 and you make $94

If you collect their email address and only send them some presell emails, and in doing so manage to get a 6% conversion rate your profit will now be $282.

(NOTE: The above example is based on a 6% conversion rate using presell emails. If you take the time to build a relationship with your list then that conversion rate should be much higher)

But it gets even better – just because some people didn’t buy that offer doesn’t mean they won’t buy something else, so now you have the opportunity to offer them something else to see whether they will buy that instead.

PLUS the people who did buy the first offer might also buy other related products and services so that original $94 you would have earned from simply sending them to a sales letter has grown to $282 and with additional offers it can easily double to $564 or more… much more!

Now let’s multiply this out a little to see the real impact of these small changes over the period of a year…

Going back to the 2% direct linking example that most people try to make money from, and assuming that you make a total income of $9,400 for the year, then the corresponding income if you’d made the effort to capture the email addresses first would be $56,600

$9,400 or $56,600… One method isn’t an income and the other is a job replacement for many people and all because a little extra effort was put into building the list first.

ONCE AGAIN: If you’re not building a list YOU’RE WORKING TOO HARD!

You can even have that affiliate link on your thank you page AFTER they have joined your list so you’re presenting them with the offer immediately anyway, but not before you have their name and email address.

Yet so many people do everything and anything they can to avoid building a list because there is the assumption that it’s hard, when it really isn’t.

The only difference between you and a super affiliate is the list.

So, having said that, you can understand why I always recommend building a list in your market.

It’s the easy way to make money

It’s easier to recycle traffic (send offers to your current list) than to attract new traffic

The same people can earn you money time and time again

You will always make more sales and income

With your own list, you can build a relationship with your customers where they will trust you and respect (comply with) your recommendations.

You can build your brand and that’s how you build a business rather than the JOB of trying to get more traffic and sell to strangers all the time.